The mass of books lead lives of quiet desperation. Compared to the dowdy shops of yesteryear, the modern bookstore is a place of gaiety, even exuberance. But with essentially three months to make their mark before returning from whence they came, under Australia's self-devouring sale-or-return system, books must dress to impress: while they've got you - that is, while you're looking at them, perhaps fondling or flicking through their pages for a tactile acquaintance - they strain for maximum impact. Every publisher is after that dazzling image, that killer title; less obvious, perhaps, is the irresistible spread of the expository subtitle, now so subtly pervasive that non-fiction books going without seem undersold, even underwhelming.

Lately, in fact, subtitles have begun sprawling so intractably as to collapse under their own weight. For Charlie Wilson's War, George Crile just gets away with The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times. But Christopher Booker and Richard North have had to disaggregate Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth; likewise Tim Baker with High Surf: The World's Most Inspiring Surfers, Waveriding as a Way of Life, The Ocean as Teacher. So much ozone does Lawrence Solomon deplete in naming his climate-change screed The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud that he needs another breath before a footnote adding And Those Who Are Too Fearful to Do So.

Such subtitles attempt to make the books appear not just more important than they actually are, but more popular. It was Norman Mailer who commented that Americans were incapable of approaching a book that was not already a success, and the essence of marketing in publishing today is gilding titles with the aura of the bestseller before they have achieved, or even approximated, such status. The effect of browsing in a bookshop, as a result, has become like speed-dating a string of garrulous drunks. Psst: wanna know The Inside Story of How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the World's Greatest Company? Yep, that's me: Jacked Up. Let's get it on, babe.

The subtitle also operates as a trailer to a motion picture - albeit that just as some trailers leave you with the feeling of having already seen the film, so some subtitles induce a distinct déjà vu. Let's check the American politics section, shall we? Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. (Hmm.) Kevin Phillips' American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. (Wait a minute.) Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth: The Real History of the Bush Administration. (What's going on?) Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War and Still Imperils America's Future. (Haven't I just read this?) Michael Moore's Stupid White Men ... And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! New Edition with Added Extras, Completely Updated, New Foreword: The Number 1 Bestseller. (Ah, now I get it.) Harriet Lamb's Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles: How We Took On the Corporate Giants to Change the World. (Next!) At its worst, the effect is a gobful of sententious clichés. For Al Gore's assault on prose, The Assault on Reason amply suffices: nothing is added by How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World except the sense of a Nobel Prize fashionably squandered.